Full Circle Flight
Full Circle Flight is a small aircraft company specializing in survivability for its customers. Its production models generally fall into two categories: highly capable combat craft, and transport vessels designed to outrun all but the fastest attackers. Most of FCF's initial production run revolves around extensive modifications to existing aircraft, but more recently there have been forays into entirely new plane designs. FCF is a small company, with jobs for only forty skilled workers (surprisingly, none of them moles,) a handful of administrative staff, and a small core of pilots. The entire facility is mobile, housed in a gutted Barracuda, and travels regularly around the core skylands giving demonstrations and making deliveries. Founding Tristan Cobalt founded Full Circle Flight in 205 A.U. with only around 10,000,000Ģ in starting capital. Son and heir to a rich trading baron, Tristan set out to succeed on his own terms in an industry that seemed more interesting than the family shipping business. After first hiring a talented but inexperienced group of designers to begin working on some initial offerings, Tristan used almost a quarter of his meager funding to purchase the blimp that would become the FCF Klineract, the company's only production facility. Equipping and staffing the blimp long enough to get construction ready took another half the capital, so by the time the first design schematics were ready, there was little money left to build a plane. FCF was in financial trouble, and had to rely on the marketing and negotiation skills of Galina Kalinin to earn those critical first few orders, payment up-front, and without a completed prototype. Fortunately the engineers found a few cost-saving measures as construction began, and Full Circle Flight soon turned a profit on its first production model, the Angel. The design was far from perfect, and has since gone through several design reviews, but those first few small fighter-planes earned the company some much needed respect. Demonstration Pilots With several planes out the door and the financial worries over, the engineers began to finish other designs while Tristan himself began to seek out pilots to show off his new planes. By hiring pilots who already owned a Valkyrie, or preferentially the improved Mk-ii model, he was able to bring them on with promises of company-covered Angel upgrades and free service at the Klineract. By further giving them the autonomy to fly anywhere they choose, so long as they sport the company logo, he got away with paying them very little while simultaneously improving his advertising network. One of the pilots he hired in this manner was serendipitously nicknamed Circle, and at the behest of the marketing department, the young giraffette was quickly made into the poster-girl and eventually the public face of Full Circle Flight's operations. There was some initial dissent about her rapid promotion in the company ranks, but her bright personality and genuine competence have quieted most of the complaints. Experimental Planes Though FCF production numbers would remain low, the crew soon had enough money to cover purely scientific projects never intended to turn a profit. The first of these designs was an aerodynamocs experiment built on a Cetacea frame, intended to push the envelope in our understanding of thrust. Dubbed the Stone due to wide speculation that it would never fly, the plane was reenforced with a small fortune in unobtainium to ensure that it remained airborn long enough to test the high-drag engines. The experiment proved that sufficiently inefficient engines can actually slow a plane down when running at full power, causing a plane to dip dangerously below its own stall speed. Around the time of the arrival of the Cout and the Order, FCF was brought in to work on a top secret project working with elite Blue scientists, the details of which are still classified. However, it is known that as a result or side-effect of this project the FCF Klineract is highly fuel efficient, and its engine room is now off-limits to outsiders.